Alex Russell calls for a return to the browser wars, citing (among other things) the stagnancy of the W3C as a part of the problem, with the argument that browser makers are the ones who can innovate and they’re being prevented from doing so by a slavish insistence on “standards”. Meanwhile, Andy Clarke calls for the current W3C CSS Working Group to be immediately disbanded, Opera file an antitrust complaint against Microsoft, the HTML5 spec removes a recommendation for non-patent-encumbered video formats after pressure from Nokia and Apple, and all the old fights start up again. Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies. Rivers and seas boiling. Forty years of darkness. Earthquakes, volcanoes. The dead rising from the grave. Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together. Mass hysteria. Alex has a point. There is nothing but truth in the old saw that a camel is a horse designed by committee. Evolutionary theory tells us that actual forward progress happens faster in small communities, not in big ones. Browser manufacturer innovation is exemplified by Microsoft creating XMLHttpRequest, which ushered in the shiny world of Ajax; standards committee “innovation” is exemplified by XHTML 2.0, about which no-one gives a shit. Forward the innovation. Let the browser builders off the leash of blind and feverish compliance with “standards” made up by committee. However. Let us not forget that the problem with the browser wars wasn’t that it fragmented the world in lots of different directions. The problem with the browser wars was that it fragmented the world in lots of different directions that weren’t possible to eventually implement everywhere. Don’t think of the output of this “innovation” as XMLHttpRequest. Think of it as the IE filter property, which is, as described on that page, “not available on the Macintosh platform”. For those of you innocent of such things, this allows you, in Internet Explorer, to apply a visual effect to a bit of an HTML page, where that visual effect is actually implemented by DirectX, Microsoft’s graphics library. Good luck porting that to Safari if it takes off. Oh no, hang on, it’s “not available on the Macintosh platform”, even in Mac IE, is it? Not that Mac IE exists any more. The point here is very much the same as the point behind objections to DRM technologies on music. When browser manufacturers are told “go ahead and innovate — we want to see progress”, it’s jolly difficult for them to not think “hey, I know, why don’t we take this opportunity to provide something that we can do and other browsers can’t? Then, when people start using it, we’ve locked all their users into our browser!” There are corporate executives the world over furiously masturbating themselves into unconsciousness at the very thought of that technique being open to them again. Perhaps you’ve bought a few products from their corporations in the past. Standards bodies aren’t really there to think up ideas, although that’s what they seem to have evolved into. They’re there to say, now, hang on a second, if you do that then what about all the people with no working eyes / some other operating system / touchscreens / no money for patent licences. They’re there to make sure that the web, which is meant to be there for everyone, isn’t separated into the haves and the have-nots, where the have-nots is everyone who won’t or can’t jump on the latest bandwagon. This is precisely why Silverlight is trying to supplant the web: to divide us into haves and have-nots. It’s why Flash is trying to supplant the web: to divide us into haves and have-nots. It’s why XUL as an application-development language for web apps was doomed. It’s possible that the people Alex is calling on to do “innovation” in the browser will put the best interests of the web first, and the best interests of their companies and their browsers second. It’s also possible that a duck will fly in the window right now, juggle some lemon pies, and then deliver IE8, but I don’t think that that’s very likely either. The current mess over the proposed <video> element is a perfect case in point here: Nokia and Apple have refused to contemplate using the suggested Ogg Theora video codec as a baseline format, because they fear submarine patents despite the Theora project’s assurances. OK, they may have a point. However, the HTML5 people have stated, after this pressure from Nokia and Apple, that “we need a codec that is known to not require per-unit or per-distributor licensing, that is compatible with the open source development model, that is of sufficient quality as to be usable, and that is not an additional submarine patent risk for large companies”. It is just not possible for such a codec to exist. So, what we, the ordinary web developers of the world, are left with is precisely the same cluster-fuck that we currently have when publishing video: it is still not possible for me to make a video and put it on the web with some assurance that everyone can actually see the fucking thing. How is browser vendors’ “innovation” going to help with this? If they were truly “innovative” then we’d see them trying to co-operate on issues like this, because how can it be bad for ordinary web users and web developers to make it easier to publish and watch video? Standards organisations aren’t there to dictate what Microsoft and Apple and Mozilla and Opera are “allowed” to implement. They’re there to provide a voice for people who will otherwise be merrily buttfucked and then thrown over the side in the pursuit of “innovation”. Think Web Standards Project rather than W3C. Of course, the WaSP seems to have lost its way and its voice a bit recently; are they coming back? It’s easy to just say “no, no, no” to new ideas, but it’s equally easy to say, well, I’m alright, Jack, if you’re not coming along with us then you’ll just get left behind, regardless of whether you’re not coming along because you’re unable to. If you think that Apple were right to resist video formats, ask yourself if you’d have been happy if the HTML5 spec had suggested Windows Media format as the default. If you think that browser vendors should innovate, ask yourself how happy you’d be implementing DirectX on a Macintosh. Fix things, yeah. Put some innovation back in, yeah. Let’s, though, try to not throw out the baby along with the bathwater.
Concerning submarine patents over Ogg and associated codecs, this argument is total bullshit. Even the MPEG-LA does not offer any warranty that they are licensing all the patents necessary to implement the specification. In short, even if you pay the patent protection money to the MPEG-LA gangster, there is not insurance that another gangster won’t be coming after you for another protection racket.
Wow, that hit the nail squarely on the head.
/me applauds
To be honest, the .ogg argument from W3C really broke the straw for me.
W3C either really stands for no patent encumberment – then they use a free standard, or implement their own – or they will watch as the multimedia sector will continue to be eaten up by flash and similar proprietary solutions.
In this regard, YES, I want a war! (A technology war about competing technologies … not one where people get hurt.)
While they removed the language recommending that Vorbis and Theora be supported by web browsers, the replacement language says that there should be non-encumbered baseline audio and video formats in HTML.
Unlike the previous language, the new language is harder to argue against without looking like you want to take the web proprietary.
It is unfortunate that it doesn’t help spread Vorbis/Theora, but if Firefox and Opera decide to support the format that might be enough. After all, you probably only need to install the appropriate DirectShow or Quicktime codecs to get support in IE or Safari. If that process can be streamlined similar to plugin installation, then it may be good enough to rely on.
What James said is right on; we didn’t remove the Ogg requirement in favour of licensed codecs, we removed it in favour of royalty free codecs that all the browsers would agree to implement (not everyone agreed to implement Ogg). Sadly we haven’t actually _found_ a suitable codec yet, but we haven’t given up.
Opera and Mozilla already have Ogg support in their respective development branches.
(Oh, also, it wasn’t the W3C that removed the Ogg codec from the spec. It was me, as part of my work on the WHATWG, which happens to be syndicated to the W3C through an agreement we have with them.)
Regarding standards development by committee, I couldn’t agree more. I think with the WHATWG model (a “benevolent dictator” whose job it is to represent everyone’s opinions and find the most balanced solution for everyone to follow) we can have all the advantages of open standards without the disadvantages of the committee. Hopefully the innovations in HTML5 will exemplify this.
Hixie: I thought I’d avoided suggesting that the W3C removed the wording from the spec; I may have left a misleading impression, though. (The above was partially written for people who don’t really know what’s going on; I had some stuff about WHATWG in an earlier draft but took it out because it diluted the point. A mistake there, perhaps.)
That aside, I cannot see how this mystical codec can possibly come about without co-operation from browser vendors. Both Apple and Nokia have basically said “we won’t use anything unless it’s proprietary and non-open-source-implementable (i.e., requires patent licencing fees), or unless we created it and therefore we’re happy about it”. Since one of them creating it won’t satisfy the others, and if one of them creates it they’re highly unlikely to make it implementable by anyone else anyway (see point about increasing browser share), I don’t see a way forward here. So, the ordinary web publisher gets caught in the crossfire, because there’s *still* no way to publish a video so that everyone can watch it.
James: I agree, except that I can’t see how, given that some vendors have rejected an *existing* unencumbered codec, how they’ll be happy with a theoretical non-existent unencumbered codec. How will it be possible, as above, for such a codec to be created?
Hub: I know. It’s ridiculous.
Stewart:
Good points. Let me try to address some of them.
First, you make the salient observation that browser vendors are all angling for increased market share and that sometimes they’ll implement features which might be difficult (if not impossible) for others to follow. I’ll point out in this case that it’s a quick road to oblivion and those types of features quickly die or do not survive the standardization process. I never suggested that standardization of features shouldn’t happen, and therefore in the culling process, only the fittest features become standardized (hopefully). It is therefore in the best interest of renderer vendors to develop new differentiating features which *can be standardized*. If nothing else, the club wielded by the web development community alone should see to that.
Next, WRT the HTML 5 video codec, this is more of an example of worlds colliding than layout-style feature development. Most professional video codecs are patent encumbered in some way, although I’ve got to say that the Theora project could lessen the concerns raised by Apple et al by joining the W3C and making themselves subject to the W3C’s IPR policy. This would be an example of the W3C doing it’s job well. In this instance, the IPR policy (and Theora project involvement) would serve to either show that Apple and Nokia are serious about their concerns or turn up that they’re just backing H.264 (which appears to “have legs” in every environment *but* linux) and don’t want to do the work of integrating Theora and can use patents as a convenient excuse. I don’t know which it is, but it’s a great thing for a group like the W3C to sort out.
While what I’m advocating for necessarialy implies uncertainty in the near-term, it does so in the interest of resolving large questions which don’t even have an Open Web expression of any sort today. Standardization is still important for all the reasons you point out, but I don’t think that should dissuade us in any way from encouraging browser vendors to experiment (and *then* standardize). The genius of markets that work is that they employ the selfish interests of each party for the collective good of all. It’s time for the web developers of the world to back off a bit and let the market work.
Where there is no risk, there is no opportunity.
Regards
Don’t forget dirac.
..and moonlight seems to be coming along well.. so silverlight will be much better for the internet than flash ever was.
Alex: I see the theory about how non-portable features won’t survive the standardisation process, but the problem with putting browser vendors first and standardisation afterwards is that that _doesn’t matter_. If, say, Microsoft invent a new thing that only works on Windows, it gets out there in IE8, people start using it, and then the standardisation process refuses to anoint this new technique precisely because it isn’t portable off Windows, do you think that they’ll take that feature back out in IE9? Hell no; partially because it’s a differentiator that locks people in, and partially because of the IE team’s insistence on never breaking anything for backwards-compatibility purposes. Post-facto standardisation only works if the browser vendors listen to the standards bodies, and they basically won’t in that situation, especially if the chosen new features have already locked in market share.
I agree that you have to take risks to make progress. This does not mean that all risks are ipso facto a good thing! It just means that something should not be dismissed purely on account of it being risky. Allowing browser vendors, who have knowingly and repeatedly put platform dominance above making the web better, to dictate how the web should work, isn’t risky, it’s foolhardy. We’re already fighting a somewhat losing battle in places; let’s not cede what little influence we have away just to get new shiny toys.
New shiny toys is what we’re talking about, too. Half the sorts of things that would be useful are low-level non-shiny developer stuff, and despite being standardised I’m not seeing them show up cross-browser. Where are getters and setters in IE, for example? (They showed up in WebKit, fortunately.)
ethana2: I can’t see how Dirac would solve the problem. Even ignoring the fact that it’s still not ready, Nokia and Apple and Microsoft will still have the same fears of submarine patents.
Hey Stewart:
So you’re right to be worried about the situation that you outline, but maybe I can try another tack.
Yes, lets say that Vendor X does something on OS Y that isn’t portable off that platform and they never take it out. So what? It lost. The thing that get standardized will win on an evolutionary basis because more content will evolve which is digestable by a broad majority of clients. In the long run, the only thing that matters is that you convince Vendor X to also implement the standards-based way once the dust is settled. The gambit still works. See document.all.
As for the risks, I’m simply personalizing and translating them for the web development community. They are pre-existing and not of my creation. Without a public airing, web developers are responding to them in two very sub-optimal ways. The first is the slow, whispered, and personally wrenching defections to the Flex and Silverlight camps. I’m witnessing it amongst my friends right now. This is not a fast thing, nor is it loud, but it is present and real.
The second response is simply for the webdev community to stick its head in the sand and pretend that standards compliance will yield nirvana. This is pernicious and no less real or present. By doing nothing (which is what that approach functionally achieves), the web grows smaller because our definition of what the web is stops growing. Other platforms will pick up the slack and the web will simply become the perpetually perfected, calcified remains of a nice experiment. If that doesn’t scare the shit out of you, I don’t know what will.
We have no proof that standardize-first works, and we have lots of proof that standardize-last works. What can you possibly lose by letting new features emerge under the standardize-last regime? You weren’t going to get them under the standardize-first system anyhow, so anything useful that shows up is gravy. Right?
Regards
Alex: I have examined that argument and found it relatively compelling. I would therefore like to pose a question, to see how it would work. Let’s take the video element as an option: we’ll assume that browser manufacturers should go out and work on this how they want. How would we then convince Nokia and Apple and Microsoft to make whichever royalty-free codec available? I’m not all that convinced by your evolutionary it’ll-lose-in-the-marketplace argument (although I am becoming convinced by the rest of it). I don’t see how we get past the chicken-and-egg problem; new stuff (in this example, an unencumbered codec) won’t get popular until it’s implemented, but it won’t get implemented until it’s popular.
I think you’re right that the slow defection away from the Web towards limited single-vendor non-web pernicious things like Silverlight and Flash is a really serious long-term problem that people are overlooking in their desire to get the shiny. Then again, I feel the same way about operating systems, which is why I’m a Linux user, and not everyone shares my views on this.
Stewart: as there is no final HTML 5 standard, the current working draft should be considered as a snapshot of the standardisation process.
The removal of the Vorbis/Theora recommendation was a compromise necessary to get some important players on side: necessary to ensure adoption.
Hopefully the new language is something that everyone can agree on, and can be a basis for further standardisation work. And as I said previously, to oppose the current wording is to say you want to put toll booths on the web. They can’t bring up specific arguments about Theora as a response.
Two ways forward from here are:
1. find a codec that satisfies the current language and is acceptable to the browser makers. This could even be Theora if the patent issues don’t get resolved.
2. The language stays as is, and we have to rely on defacto adoption of an acceptable codec. This’d be closer to how the various image formats gained support in browsers.
Nokia owns a lot of video related patents and gets paid for them. They also are one of the biggest lobby for software patents in the European Union.
Nokia doesn’t like the idea of a codec like Theora where no one has to pay to be able to use it. That’s all there is to it. If you look at what they were doing in the last five years it’s pretty clear Nokia wants to become a big player in the media arena and they will try to achieve it by using their growing patent portfolio.
Fear of a submarine Theora patent ? don’t make me laugh. That’s the worse excuse they could come up with.
Hey Stewart,
So there are a couple of ways for the <video> tag thing to play out. The first and most likely is one you won’t like. The spec, in order to form consensus, will not specify any format but will instead defer to clients and instruct them to handle any video formats they know how to. That will mean a format war, but one which is being fought fairly. Got ogg content? An ogg plugin or filter should then allow a conforming browser to handle ogg content. In the long run, a free format has an advantage, and a neutral solution like this preserves ogg’s chances in the market and significantly expands its applicability. Most likely in the interim, though, is that Linux distros will find sponsors willing to front the H.264 licensing fee or it’ll be another DeCSS-style situation. Not ideal but remember that this is essentially how the linux world deals with Flash, and there’s significantly less gnashing of teeth regarding the deeply un-free nature of Flash and the licensed codecs it bundles (including H.264).
At the end of the day, I really don’t see how to cast this discussion in light of convincing large vendors to integrate something like Ogg. They will choose formats which are easy for them to work with, provide them with compatibility with a large percentage of their content producers, and which make it easier for people to generate new great content for them to consume. They will chose those formats on that basis because if they don’t, the competition will totally crush them. If Ogg fails in the light of a relatively level playing field, it won’t be because there was a conspiracy, it will be because it wasn’t better.
Regards
You’re dead wrong about XHTML v2.
If MS bothered to support XHTML properly in IE (in strict validation mode not tag soup emulation) most enterprises would require XHTML for their apps as it’s so much easier to check the contactor did proper work when there are automated validators on the market.
Nicolas: XHTML 2.0, not XHTML 1.0 or 1.1. No-one gives a shit about XHTML 2.0.
The difficulty (writing, them, getting them to work, getting them adopted) of “really innovating” with a new feature/s and implementing them well very quickly makes it seem strange that the browser makers in particular don’t embrace “soft innovation” – a la Seth Godin (the little things, like the Terra Blue chips on Jet Blue that you remember, the way it smells outside the Cold Stone Creamery Ice Cream parlor and it draws you in – that is on purpose – all the stuff you can do on the cheap to give yourself competitive advantage like a fan blowing sweet scents into the crowd). If the/a browser is faster, prettier and more elegant (like Safari can be) – it can/could be preferred not because it has extra buttons to push but because it simply enhances and improves the user experience without being obtrusive.
Features are expensive to implement and often aren’t adopted by the users. I don’t think software makers actually have much experience really making great products, capitalizing on soft innovations – generating revenue with lesser expense – because they haven’t historically had to compete at this tight a level and they don’t really yet know how to do it fully. With the latest Zune we are seeing the acknowledgment of this newer, quasi soft sell, fringe site approach generate much more buzz than a conventional and likely more expensive marketing effort.
Further, the idea that the browser makers should and or can push the innovation is only true again so far as they adopt real interoperability…
So now I see it – it is the lock down or not the lock down and it seems the the owners of the web would prefer keep it not free as a baseline.
In any event, my point is that once you have a baseline standard that really works for everyone (consistent box model and form controls for starters), then you really open up your platform for development because it is inclusive and easy to target – attractive to developers and manufacturers. If XUL had a Visual Studio type IDE (to dumbify it all down) and some marketing it could very well do much better – the tech is there. It is such a shame really that the markets are so tight they are inherently stifling. You gotta pay to play. What makes the most sense should also be attractive – just because the least comprehensive solution has the best marketing, certainly doesn’t make it it better by default.
The “business” can’t believe they can make money off of this model and so we are seeing what Stuart has so well described. We see Apple with the iPod and iTunes ,the store in particular doing so well – this being accomplished by locking things down and controlling the end to end experience completely, it is no wonder the major money, big business guys like MS want to continue to go down a contentious route that offers some return over one in which they aren’t sure yet how to compete.
The thwarting of standards by MS always was deliberate (of course) – the issue continues to be for me at least that if they want to lock us into their platform at least have it be better/work better than peer’s wares – the iPod does lock you in but the consumer is willing to expect/accept that lock in mostly because the experience is so seamless. The consumer backlash against lock in is small because the tight integration is what makes it all work so well.
I wish is wasn’t so hard to believe that an open model, based on true/observed/similarly implemented standards and interoperability can coexists with the Nokia’s, Apple’s and Microsoft’s of the world.
It’s getting to the point were there will be two webs (or are two webs) – the only thing I can offer as a possible solution would be a bipartisan (for lack of a better word – a somehow objective, unbeholden person – business to open source wise) technical expert to be an Ombudsmen of sorts because the warring tribes of manufactures/developers clearly continue to see little incentive to open things up and keep them consistent. Anything moving them away from controlling every aspect of user experience on their stuff is scary, again I hope that some of them can realize that by publishing and implementing sensible standards for interoperability, IMO makes it that much easier to provide a superior consumer experience – not a lesser one – a typical video in a web page has more chance of being viewed and displayed on any device if it has been marked up with care. You don’t alienate the consumer either – whatever works for them (browser plugin etc.). This would seem to be a win win, if it weren’t for the additional time and expense the business believes it incurs – not realizing the value that displaying anywhere in a forwards compatible way brings – we just might see cleaner, better, more cross platform code in the wild with great frequency.
If you aren’t 100 percent sure of the display device how is not using standards gonna help? Not much. So the companies that make that hardware and also distribute content can lock it down and provide adequate delivery, but that leaves little room for anyone else without 2 feet already in the door so to speak, and for the consumer, a confusing, fractured experience that needs a healthy does of truly objective reform (If I make a browser, hardware player, plugin, standalone media manager – and they are solid apps – you can get away with this – short having of this incredibly hard to pull off infrastructure like Apple does, standards would seem to be the little guys only chance at getting any play – they lack they leverage of such a controlled delivery mechanism and ecosystem – so I would also proffer standards are the friend of the newer player, smaller business).
I think in the end it is just too hard and too expensive for most of these vendors to make their wares fully standards complaint and interoperable – e.g. Sony seems unable to write basic software for example – no surprise there are all sort of other touch points on which they fail hard – all the more reason for some objective regulation as I see it.
If we want to encourage monopolies, let’s let standards be thwarted, because that is what we will/do have in their absence.
Anyone will tell you there’s way too goddamn much innovation on the web right now. Around 40% of the average web developer’s time is wasted trying to figure workarounds that make IE render things like basic CSS that work fine on Opera or Mozilla but break under IE.
Flash is a mess. It essentially locks everyone into Macromedia’s proprietary platform, and worse than that, it makes spiders and bots unable to discern whether the flash app actually contains the content claimed in the meta tags (and flash text can’t be spidered anyway, so flash effectively walls off any text inside from searchability) and even worse than that, more than 50% of internet surfers still use dialup, so they’re completely locked out of flash gateway sites.
PHP or Python or Perl effectively render many websites so differently on different browsers and different versions of Windows that you wind up with scrambled web pages half the time. How often have you had to shift into a different browser to get rid of text that leaked over into pictures or search buttons that wouldn’t work? It happens a LOT. And it’s getting worse. Dvorak (whom everyone hates, but who is often right) had a great column about the mess PHP has created in previously workable viewable websites.
Probably at least half the population is still using IE5. Most of the rest use IE6. Neither of those render CSS properly anbd both have massive known bugs when working with table layouts. When you add the Javascript implementation native to Win 2K or XP, which is also buggy and quirky and out of date, you’ve got massive problems.
Sites like this one seem to be a rarity. No goddamn gradient background via PHP, no complex floating multicolumn divs and spans, no floating shadows done via CSS, no complex embedded graphics in tables that edge over into blocks of filled color. Damn! If the entire web were like this page, I wouldn’t have a problem with current web design trends. I’m SICK of the freaking gradients and drop shadows and other eye-candy garbage that takes forever to load, often won’t render properly, and serves no useful purpose whatever. If I hit a pure Flash gateway, I’m gone, won’t even look at the site. Streaming audio required? I’m gone, bye-bye. 90% of the web is text. Give me text. That’s all. YouTube is videos of wasterskiing chipmunks and dogs on skateboards. I don’t care. Multimedia on the web is disposable. If someone wants it, let ‘em install Flash, but it’s a waste of everyone’s time. The entire web design standards system should not get bent out of shape to acommodate fuzzy little postage-stamp-sized videos of watserskiing squirrels.
To hell with innovation in browsers. Let’s get all the browsers to the point where they can render CSS properly. Let’s get that done. To hell with streaming audio, put it in a zipped ogg file and let us download it in the background. Let’s get that done. Oh, and by the way — let’s get that 50-plus percent of the population that’s currently stuck on dialup on affordable broadband even if they’re located in Craters Of the Moon ID. Let’s get that done. Then we can worry about multimedia standards and other innovations.
Alex: that’s what I was worried you were going to say, which is why I wasn’t convinced by your it’ll-win-in-the-marketplace argument.
“If Ogg fails in the light of a relatively level playing field… it will be because it wasn’t better” applies because big companies’ definition of “better” doesn’t include “it enables our competitors”. If a small company decides to get into the browser market, in that situation, they can’t do it, because all the “innovation” that’s already been done requires you (or your users) to pay patent licencing fees. Now, I’m not expecting large companies to try and find ways to enable competition — that’d be naive, of course, and it’s not what they’re in business to do. We, the web community, ought to be in the business of making sure that it’s possible to compete with the incumbents without having a huge pile of cash, though, because balkanising the web just so you can choose which big corporation to be screwed by is not really an improvement. That’s the problem with ceding control of what happens to companies which don’t necessarily have the web’s best interests at heart, and it’s my opinion that “having the web’s best interests at heart” doesn’t include “making users pay to use it” or “making browser manufacturers pay to take part”.
[...] those lines goes James Bennet with his elaborate essay The future of web standards, and I am pretty sure we are [...]
[...] everything so far is the “Future of Web Standards” article at b-list.org. Also “Reigniting the Browser Wars” and The W3C Cannot Save Us are excellent reads. Tags: CSS, Firefox, HTML, IE, W3C, [...]
[...] recently been a lot of noise about a return to the browser wars (Alex Russell, Jeff Croft, Stuart Langridge, James Bennett). The point being that standards take eons to complete and standards bodies [...]
Hi All,
I love these commentaries, what would you use @ /Home?
Regards,
JJMacey
[...] Reigniting the Browser Wars (tags: html standards essay rant) [...]
JJMacey: not sure I understand your question? I use Firefox and Epiphany at home, if that helps.
Well, the problem of AV codecs seems to have a philosophic dimension too. It’s actually a clash of OSS and commercial cultures.
It’s highly unlikely either side will withdraw from the dispute. Any similar case in the IP history? Can’t find such one. Simply put, there are too many requirements to be met and codecs are thought to be a means of making money via royalties. So what’s the feasible way to proceed? To be realistic, I suggest leave the
Thank you for this post. An excellent write-up on the current situation.
Whilst the WHATWG/HTML5 stuff is somewhat separate from the main points of this argument, I have to ask myself: how much easier would this whole business be if we didn’t have Software Patents? Hmm?
Ben: much, much easier. Much. Oppose software patents.
Well without software patents we would all be using H264..
But software patents are not going to disappear from the USA anytime soon. And retards like Nokia (the ones who are giving us trouble here) are also pushing the European Union into the patent oblivion.
mclaren: I would point out that blaming PHP for rendering errors is pretty much a non-starter. PHP doesn’t kill people, HTML kills people. There are a great many problems with PHP as a development environment, but HTML rendering is – as a general rule – not our fault.
“Standards organisations aren’t there to dictate what Microsoft and Apple and Mozilla and Opera are “allowed” to implement. They’re there to provide a voice for people who will otherwise be merrily buttfucked and then thrown over the side in the pursuit of “innovation”.”
This line exemplifies it all. I love the no-bullshit air of this site.
Z: I agree. H.264 is a pretty good video codec.
A camel is an animal which is perfectly adapted to its environment (desert). In this environment, a horse, which can neither recycle water from its own breath, protect its eyes from sandstorms, walk steadily on shifty sand dunes, carry a week’s supply of water, would quickly become useful only as a good supply of protein. So, I argue that the old Saw of yours is rusty and unsharpened.
Stewart:
One last parting thought: enabling your competitors == enabling your users (for some value of “==”). Enabling users is the only way to make things which are really great (hence Microsoft’s video codec largess).
Arguing that competition won’t work because it won’t end up with the exact endpoint which you prefer is to cut off your nose in spite of your face.
The best we can do is to encourage invention and *then* standardization under free and fair rules. Should the W3C prefer freely implementable codecs? Of course. Should we create a cloud of uncertainty for Flash to exploit while we dicker about it? Hell no.
Lets get on with making it better already.
Regards
Alex: I completely agree that enabling your competitors is a good way to enable your users; I completely agree that fighting competition because it might not end up how you want is a bad idea. It’s not me you’ve got to convince; it’s MIcrosoft and Apple and Nokia. Until they’ve been convinced of that, though, I think it’s not a good idea to let them run things.
Stewart: they *already* “run things”. It’s only implementers who have any power in this situation at all. The game has always been about convincing implementers and (I suspect) may always be. The important thing to do at the W3C is to ensure that good conventions are solidified and that bad ones are loosened such that there’s a chance for them to lose.
Regards
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Extremely lucid! Thank you.
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